In an exclusive Newsmax.TV interview, the 2008 GOP presidential hopeful alleged that conservative opponents of the mosque and cultural center two blocks from the World Trade Center site in New York City are blaming all Muslims for the Sept. 11 attacks instead of focusing their ire on al-Qaida, the actual perpetrator.

Paul’s stance has placed him at odds with many Republicans, including his son, Kentucky GOP Senate candidate Rand Paul, who voiced his opposition to the proposed mosque and Islamic center two blocks north of ground zero during a recent Newsmax.TV interview.

Conservatives are enamored with the idea of having an imperial presence on the world’s stage, with troops stationed around the globe, the elder Paul says.

“They support the war in Afghanistan and Iraq — and actually support plans for intimidating and moving toward war in Iran,” he says. “They have to have a reason for that, and they can’t say it’s for oil or they can’t say it’s to . . . make them all democrats over there.

“You have to have somebody you are willing to hate — you have to have a Hitler to hate.”

Paul believes such advocates are making Muslims that hate target to get Americans to support the wars.

“They have to keep the drumbeat of hate up, so they have to blame the entire religion,” he says. “That’s not everybody . . . that might support or not support building the mosque, because a lot of people just say, ‘That’s bad manners and they shouldn’t do it because they haven’t thought it through.’”

Although Paul disagrees with his son about the mosque, he does not include him in the same category as those who oppose the project because they see Islam as the enemy.

Asked whether concerns about the $100 million project’s getting Iranian funding have merit, Paul says: “We never treat anybody else who is building a church or a mosque to check where actually the money is coming from and what everybody believes in. I mean, if something turns up, you deal with it if they break the law.

“But in religion and freedom of speech, you give people the benefit of the doubt.”

Suggesting that the government look into the project’s funding threatens the First Amendment because it would equal censorship, he says. New York GOP gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio is among those who have urged such an audit.

“I don’t want government coming in and checking on anything like this, and implying . . . that bad people have supported it,” Paul says.

On BlackBerry bans and the real threat to national security
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Mohannad El-Khairy

When the UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced the ban of email, web browsing and instant-messaging services on all BlackBerries for reasons of national security, Research in Motion (RIM), the devices’ manufacturer based in Canada, delved into the global spotlight, its tense negotiations with governments around the region taking center stage, leaving millions of blackberry users wondering whether their smart-phones will be rendered … well … not so smart after all.

Oh Dubai, never a stranger to being in the lime light, no matter how dim the light gets.

Last year, the city’s exuberant spending on rather unnecessary construction projects were reflected in massive debt-defaults.

Earlier this year, an unfolding investigative drama took place following the assassination of Hamas arms dealer Mahmoud al-Mabhouh in a Dubai hotel room. Bravely, Dubai’s police chief Dahi Khalfan – exemplifying what a proper investigation should look like by quickly piecing together CCTV footage, immigration data and flight, phone and credit-card records to identify the suspected murderers – called on the head of the Mossad to “be a man” and admit Israel’s role in the killing of the Hamas operative.

And later in the year, a Japanese oil tanker was damaged in the Strait of Hormuz close to the UAE coast, hit by an explosives-laden dinghy arranged by an “Al-Qaeda-linked group” that confirmed one of its members had carried out the operation to avenge the “plunder of Muslim wealth,” although according to Al-Jazeera much speculation still remains as to the conflicting reports made by the “Al-Qaeda-linked Brigades of Abdullah Azzam;” some claim the bomber was killed while others outline that he is still alive.

On the news of the BlackBerry ban, a Dow Jones report stated the UAE acted after RIM refused to set up a proxy server in the country. A local server would allow the government easier access to the encrypted communications data sent by BlackBerry users in the country. RIM stood its ground, but a few weeks later reached a preliminary agreement with the government of Saudi Arabia. The UAE on the other hand insisted it is looking for an entirely different solution to that tabled in the kingdom next door. As messages sent to and from a BlackBerry are processed at RIM’s network operating center in Canada, they are encrypted on the device before being sent, and remain encrypted until they reach their destination. Dow Jones additionally stated that “another person familiar with the matter said a key worry for UAE officials was that BlackBerry’s messenger service was effectively untraceable. That could be a problem if RIM failed to hand over data sought in a criminal or terrorist probe.”

Why would the UAE do this? Why would one of the most business-driven countries in the world today harm its business-friendly image internationally with the ban of a modern business necessity? The official explanation from the TRA goes as follows:

“The TRA confirmed today that BlackBerry Messenger, BlackBerry E-mail and BlackBerry Web-browsing services in the UAE will be suspended as of October 11, 2010. The suspension is a result of the failure of ongoing attempts, dating back to 2007, to bring BlackBerry services in the UAE in line with UAE telecommunications regulations … Today’s decision is based on the fact that, in their current form, certain BlackBerry services allow users to act without any legal accountability, causing judicial, social and national security concerns for the UAE”.

The thought trail begins: BlackBerry ban … Mabhouh’s murder … “national security concerns”... “untraceable, encrypted data.” Granted, the fact that the TRA has been in discussion with RIM prior to the killing of Mabhouh implies no specific relationship between the two. But are UAE authorities looking in the right places to protect national security? Let us find out.

On the Mabhouh assassination, defenders of Israel have broadly claimed the following: that a known member of Hamas, committed to the destruction of Israel, had traveled to the UK and Germany without recourse of action by Israeli intelligence. And “fed up with this,” as one commentator suggested, Israel decided to take him out in the UAE, a country that doesn’t officially recognize the Israeli state. It is a “clean hit” with no civilians getting hurt. And it is once again Israel that suffers from “Israel bashing.”

Back in March, the Financial Times published a piece entitled “Israel is no more rogue than America.” In it, its author Andrew Roberts attempts to counter two previously written articles by Henry Siegman and David Gardner, both of whom criticized Israel’s rogue behavior following the Mossad’s assassination of Mabhouh. Statements on Israel’s legitimate right to “self-defense” were naturally, rhetorically, outlined. In Robert’s mind, this means “walls, checkpoints, or targeted assassinations.” Roberts defends Israel, claiming “[it] wants nothing more than to live peaceably within defensible borders. But equally it demands nothing less.”

Gadi Mazor and Ron Maor are founders of start-up tech firms Onset Technology in 1997 and Nobex Technologies in 2007. Both Onset and Nobex have supplied extensive technology to Research in Motion, maker of BlackBerry, for email, paging, instant messaging and multimedia applications, among others. Indeed, there are already several small software firms in the world that are supplying added-value services for BlackBerry’s operating system.

Most of Onset Technology’s early work involved the BlackBerry and the firm’s METAmessage software provides access to an enterprise’s network via a BlackBerry.

Ofer Levi, on the Jerusalem Global Venture website, writes: “Onset initially developed software to identify files in unified message boxes, and products for routing and reformatting faxes. When Mazor and Maor realized that wireless was the major force driving unified messaging, they decided to develop programs that would give handset users access to enterprise networks … In order to reach the information on an enterprise’s computer, Onset Technology’s comprehensive solution includes software that sits on an enterprise’s server linking it with requests coming from a user’s device. In other words, communications between the user and enterprise are not conducted directly via a virtual private network (VPN), but via the enterprise’s gateway.”

Indeed, Israel has become a technologist’s playground, a “Silicon Wadi,” as Israelis like to claim. Thousands of Israeli companies have contributed to the information and communication technology needs of modern day life. What do they, along with the names mentioned above, share in common?

Unlike Dubai, Unit 8200, known as “Shmone Matayim” in Hebrew, doesn’t like the lime light. Set up in the 1959 on Mount Avital in the occupied Golan Heights, Unit 8200 is as a secretive electronic warfare unit responsible for collecting signal intelligence and code decryption. Its name represents the ethnic origins of its founding members: eight Ashkenazi and 200 Iraqi Jews who were specialists in wireless communications. The unit has attained an almost mythical reputation among venture capitalists for producing the top entrepreneurial, technical and creative pioneers in the global tech industry.

Israeli billionaire Gil Shwed, CEO of Check Point Software Technologies, a NASDAQ (CHKP) listed global provider of IT security solutions pioneering Firewall and VPN technology, won’t confirm that he allegedly served at 8200.

However, in a Forbes report dated March 18, 2002, entitled: “A Fortune in Firewalls” on Shwed’s biography, Lea Goldman outlines that “a four-year-long period goes virtually unmentioned in the official biography of the Israeli billionaire Gil Shwed. This much information can be cobbled together: In 1986, Shwed, just 18 years old, joined the super secret electronic intelligence arm, Unit 8200, of the [Israeli Army]. His job most likely was to string together military computer networks in a way that would allow some users access to confidential materials and deny it to others.”

Both Gadi Mazor and Ron Maor of Onset and Nobex Technologies are veterans of Unit 8200 as well; so is the influential Yossi Vardi.

Arab resistance groups have taken notice.

In his book “By Any Means Necessary,” Dr. Ronen Bergman reveals how Hizbullah was able to detonate an explosive-rigged cell phone within the heart of Unit 8200 in February 1999, injuring two officers. The incident was hardly publicized.

Worth noting is Talpiot, another Israeli program heavily involved in the global tech industry, created in 1979 as a response to Egypt and Syria’s surprise attacks in 1973. Talpiot prepares the next generation of Israelis with outstanding academic abilities in science, physics and mathematics to utilize their expertise to further advance the Israeli Army’s research and development in the technology sector.

The UAE government’s position to ban BlackBerry devices on the grounds of national security may baffle BlackBerry users and proponents of human liberties, free speech and protection of privacy in the West. And it may eventually come into an agreement with RIM before the October 11 deadline. But once the issues are questioned and the contexts examined further, we find ourselves in an endless rabbit hole, discovering a remote and mysterious Israeli military unit giving birth to very technical minds and exporting the greatest technologies that corporations and individuals the world over utilize every day.

It is this thought trail that may lead to the real issues, issues that need further investigation for the sake of real national security.

Mohannad El-Khairy is a Palestinian residing in Dubai after living in Canada for 18 years. Khairy is a researcher who writes on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the wider geo-political situation in the Middle East and their contextual significance on the international political stage.

A Las Vegas company established to sue bloggers who clip news content is expanding its operations to a second newspaper chain.

Righthaven LLC has struck a deal with Arkansas-based WEHCO Media to expand its copyright litigation campaign, in which bloggers and aggregators across the country are being sued on allegations of infringement.

Until now, Righthaven CEO Steve Gibson’s sole announced client had been Nevada-based Stephens Media. Righthaven has issued more than 100 lawsuits since its spring inception on behalf of the Las Vegas Review Journal — Stephens’ flagship.

“I can tell you we also have near finalization for contracts with a substantial number of other publishers,” Gibson said in a telephone interview. He declined to divulge their names until Righthaven begins filing suits on their behalf.

“We’re up to our armpits in Righthaven defendants,” she said in a telephone interview.

The EFF, she said, has yet to take a case and has been helping the defendants obtain other counsel, she said.

For its part, WEHCO controls 28 papers, including the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in Little Rock, and 13 cable stations largely in the south. Its president, Paul Smith, said in a Democrat-Gazette story last week that “it’s a pretty serious matter when someone takes your copy, information you’ve spent a lot of money to produce.”

Smith did not return a telephone message seeking comment.

In July, Gibson told Threat Level that more Righthaven clients would be forthcoming. He also gave a brief accounting of how Righthaven works. Borrowing a page from patent trolls, Righthaven acquires the copyrights to newspaper content for the sole purpose of suing blogs and websites that re-post those articles without permission.

Righthaven usually demands $75,000, but will settle for a few thousand dollars.

WASHINGTON (AFP) – The United States beginning Wednesday will add a third Predator drone to patrol its border with Mexico, allowing authorities for the first time to monitor the entire stretch of land separating the two neighbors using the unmanned aircraft.

The latest drone joins two others in covering the 2,000-mile (3,200 kilometer) frontier which runs across the states of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas, the US Department of Homeland Security said.

With immigration a hot-button issue ahead of looming midterm elections in November, US President Barack Obama earlier this month signed a 600 million dollar bill aimed at reinforcing border security.

His administration is seeking to step up security as it presses for a comprehensive immigration reform measure that likely would allow many of the millions of illegal migrants in the United States to legalize their status.

Many Republican lawmakers say no immigration measure can be considered unless the federal government can ensure security along the southern US border to prevent a spillover from Mexico's crime-ridden north and to prevent the arrival of more undocumented migrants.

The United States, which is deeply concerned by the raging drug war in its southern neighbor, deployed 1,200 National Guard soldiers and 1,500 new agents to the border in recent weeks, as provided for in the recent legislation.

Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano said the first unmanned aerial system (UAS) flight from Corpus Christi in Texas would mean the whole border from California to Texas was now covered.

"With the deployment of an UAS in Texas, DHS unmanned aerial capabilities will now cover the Southwest Border-from the El Centro Sector in California all the way to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas-providing critical aerial surveillance assistance to personnel on the ground," she said.

Mozambique is being ravaged by an epidemic of spirit possession. These ‘outbreaks’ have traditionally been dismissed as superstition by commentators from afar, but it is becoming increasingly recognised that different cultures have different ways of expressing mental distress and social anguish – to the point where a team of medical scientists have just published the first large scale epidemiological study on spirit possession and its link to mental and physical illness in post-civil war Mozambique.

In this form of possession, the person feels as if their normal identity has been ‘pushed aside’ by a ‘spirit’, who takes control of their body and typically communicates with other people. After the possession episode, the person usually has amnesia for the episode.

In Western medicine, this is usually understood through a psychological process called dissociation – where normally integrated mental processes become disconnected. It’s like the psychological equivalent of when two teams in a company can’t communicate very well, so they start operating independently rather than as an integrated organisation.

"Demon Possessed Man with Evil Spirits"

In many societies around the world the concept of spirit possession plays an important role in understanding and explaining both the forces of nature and the psychology of individuals, to the point where it has both positive and negative effects.

Ethnographic studies have found that, during possession, ‘spirits’ may offer opinions or solutions to moral crises and may protect the individual from trauma and despair during times of violence.

However, negative possession states can causes problems or illnesses that are thought to be triggered by the harmful spirits, which can include anything from fertility problems, to family break-up, to physical aches and pains.

As times change, new spirits appear and old ones fade, each having different effects, benefits or risks. One legacy of the Mozambique war was the emergence of a new type of spirit that had a particular interest in the personal and social legacy of the conflict.

In the late twentieth century, as a result of the Mozambican protracted civil war, gamba spirits emerged. They became the principal harmful spirits and source of diagnosis. Gamba refers to the spirit of male soldiers who died in the war. Possession by gamba is a trauma of a double derivation. First, the host and patrikin [family on the father’s side] were severely exposed to warfare that led to vulnerability; and, second, to address that war-related vulnerability, the host’s patrikin were alleged to have perpetrated serious wrongdoings.

The person possessed by a gamba spirit publicly re-enacts the events of war, sometimes violently, and through the possessed person, the spirit demands public acknowledgement of the injustices they suffered. Spirits who are not appeased continue to torment the possessed person to the point of serious illness.

The study, led by medical anthropologist Victor Igreja and published in Social Science and Medicine, surveyed the extent of possession in two districts in central Mozambique and see how it was linked to trauma and physical health.

They used local criteria for the definition of spirit possession and validated interviews to assess trauma – such as the Harvard Trauma Questionnaire – developed to be used across cultures.

Households were selected at random, and out of 941 people evaluated, 175 (18.6%) reported some form of spirit possession while 5.6% had experienced multiple simultaneous spirit possession.

People who had been possessed were more likely to be women and have symptoms of physical illness but less likely to have had a baby. Those who went into trances as part of their possession were more likely to be experiencing psychological trauma, have fertility problems, have had a child die during their life and to suffer nightmares

One particularly striking finding was that the severity of psychological and physical symptoms was directly related to the number of spirits that a person had been possessed by, with more serious problems being associated with greater numbers of intruding spirits.

While the effects of spirit possession can be seen to have some relation to the Western diagnoses of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), depression or anxiety, there are also many distinct features that reflect a more local concept of how a distressed person can express their mental anguish.

For people familiar with diagnoses drawn from the DSM and World Health Organisation ICD system, it is tempting to think that established descriptions are the ‘real’ disorders while cases of spirit possession are simply a local interpretation of them.

What is becoming increasingly clear, however, is that both our personal experience of psychological distress and how we express that to others, is shaped by our culture. In other words, diagnoses such as PTSD may be as much wedded to a particular culture as spirit possession.

Sadly, this new study is locked behind a pay-wall, but if you have access to the full thing I recommend giving it a read through as it is a curious combination of traditional statistical epidemiology applied to the ‘diagnosis’ of possession.

The paper demonstrates that spirit possession can be studied scientifically and makes as much sense as studying any other psychiatric problem that is defined by unusual or unhelpful behaviour, such as schizophrenia or panic disorder.

My first whiff of the news was an unsettling email from a reader of my article, ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ inflating Islamophobia, indicating The Council on Foreign Relations, i.e. the Rockefeller Globalist cabal, had a hand in this. The writer was annoyed at my not considering it.

I hadn’t considered it since my focus had been on the fact that the destruction of 9/11 was not perpetrated by Muslim nations as stated categorically by the New York Post, ignoring the very possible involvement of Israel, which has a history of false-flag attacks.

I received a second email from the Corbett Report, a video report whose Sunday stories were the Ground Zero Mosque Distraction, Israel Lobby, Apple and Orwell, the first with some fascinating information about Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who heads up the Cordoba Initiative, i.e., the building of the Ground Zero Islamic center. Eureka!

The Cordoba Initiative, and Imam Rauf, Corbett went on to say, were affiliated with the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations and support for that came from fellow Council on Foreign Relations’ members. Imam Rauf himself was on the Council on Foreign Relations’ Religious Advisory Committee. The Cordoba initiative’s website cited “Christian support for the Cordoba House” from a Christian publication, “Sojourners,” which is owned by evangelical Christian writer and political activist Jim Wallis, also a sitting member of the CFR’s Religious Advisory Committee. Wow!

At some point, the American Society for Muslim Advancement (asma.org) was shown on the screen along with: “Our Supporters: U.S. Foundations.” After wincing, I froze the frame and downloaded the list, which included the Carnegie Corporations of New York, Rockefeller Brothers, Rockefeller Philanthropy, Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Henry Luce Foundation, and Hunt Alternatives, to mention a few of the globalist pack.

There was also a clip of David Rockefeller speechifying at the CFR and welcoming back Dick Cheney to a meeting. Of course, Cheney remarked that he was happy to be there, was once “director” of the organization though he didn’t mention it when he was running for Congress from his native Wyoming. This drew a big laugh from the elite insiders present.

Next Corbett referred to Nancy Pelosi, who had recently questioned who was funding the Cordoba Initiative given how it was being politicized (at Democratic expense given Obama’s “for it but not where” statements). We cut to a call from Pelosi for an investigation. We cut back to Corbett who pointed out that it was rather embarrassing for her and others when the information above was revealed; that this money was not coming from Muslims or Middle Eastern nations.

This despite a scene, in which a Cordoba employee claimed to an inquiring reporter that the money came from Muslims, corporations, and interested groups, and that it wasn’t really necessary for everyone to know who contributed.

Corbett, having discredited the claim of Muslim funding rather thoroughly, moved on to several related stories, including Israel’s spending some $35 million dollars to control articles favorable to it in the US press and to tamp down the negative press on Dimona and Palestine.

He also mentioned the $50,000 given to the Atlantic monthly to write an attack piece on Iran, because it was the “greatest threat to Israel since Hitler.” Parenthetically, the writer was a former member of the Israel Defense Force, which might account for the hyperbole, seeing how it is Israel that has hundreds of nuclear warheads at their nuclear facility at Dimona in the Negev desert.

Corbett’s last piece focused on ideas for coming advancements in Apple i-Pods and i-Phones that seemed to be straight out of Orwell’s 1984, forecasting coming police-friendly improvements/intrusions on every conceivable form of personal privacy from Apple.

I also took a step back to corroborate Rauf’s deep ties to the CFR, seeing how the NY Post had painted him more as a co-conspirator with al-Qaeda, writing, “Clearly, though this is a complicated issue. The 9/11 mass murder, after all, was committed in the name of Islam.”

That explosive statement was followed by a quote from a letter by Dan Senor of the Council on Foreign Relations in the Wall Street Journal (also owned by Rupert Murdoch, owner of the New York Post) that whatever the stated goals of the Islamic center and Rauf, “in the minds of many who are swayed by the most radical interpretations of Islam . . . it will be celebrated as a Muslim monument erected on the site of a great Muslim ‘military victory.’” And . . .”that’s why the question of who precisely will pay to build the $100 million project is so compelling.” Amazing!

Here is a CFR member, whose organization is bankrolling the Islamic center with one hat on, switches hats and demands to know precisely who will pay to cough up the $100 million. Well, Dan, it’s your very own CFR sponsors who are picking up the tab. And if you think Corbett and I are the only ones who caught you with your two hats on, and your pants down, let me go to writer Steve Watson of PrisonPlanet.com, who wrote pretty much the same thing in Ground Zero Mosque Imam is Globalist Stooge.

“The Imam of the now infamous “ground zero mosque” is a member of the ultra elitist Council On Foreign Relations and receives financial backing from powerful globalist sources including the Rockefellers, the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation.

“This information provides a compelling backdrop to the theory that the move to establish the mosque is a deliberate attempt to further stoke religious tensions and and divert attention away from the real enemy of free humanity, the corporate globalist elite who continue to profit from global war and division.”

Meanwhile, Americans all over the country, especially in lower New York City, are out in droves screaming at each other in fear over Muslim appropriation of the building site, feeling as if Muslims were at their doors with scimitars, when, in fact, it’s our own Council on Foreign Relations whipping up the synthetic terror. Doesn’t that point, too, to CFR involvement in the 9/11 event, producing the same feelings?

As to the “Globalist stooge” Rauf, I’m sure there’s a special place in hell for him, betraying his Muslim community to the danger of angry Americans to the synthetic terror threat, and frightening the latter to even more debilitating scare tactics. Let’s hope this doesn’t spill into the 9/11 commemoration ceremonies or the coinciding 9/11 As Inside Job rally that parallels them. Perhaps, if Rauf and the CFR are sufficiently exposed, that claim will have more meaning for more people than ever.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on American and world politics as an Associate Editor of Online Journal.

IPCC told to stop lobbying and restrict role to explaining climate scienceAn independent investigation into the UN’s climate change body has warned it to stop lobbying and to restrict its role to explaining the science behind any changes in global temperature.
By Stephen Adams and Robert Winnett
Published: 7:28PM BST 30 Aug 2010

Senior officials at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have also been ordered to disclose their outside financial interests to avert any allegations that they may have profited from policies to tackle global warming.

New controls should also be introduced to ensure that the scientific claims made in influential international reports are robust in future.

The independent inquiry which delivered the rebuke was ordered after the IPCC admitted it had exaggerated the pace at which Himalayan glaciers were melting. Several other errors in its recent report were also uncovered.

The admission threatened to undermine the scientific basis used by Governments around the world to justify spending billions of pounds tackling climate change.

The report published yesterday found that although the IPCC’s findings were generally sound, parts of its conduct had “dented the credibility of the process”.

It warned that “straying into advocacy can only hurt IPCC’s credibility”.

However, it did not call into question the main findings behind the 2007 report, and said that overall its assessment process of the rate of, and risks from, climate chance had "been a success and served society well".

The review, by a prestigious group of international scientific academies, will put pressure on Rajenda Pachauri, the Indian head of the IPCC.

He said last night that he would step down if the Governments in the IPCC backed calls for him to be replaced.

Harold Shapiro, a Princeton University professor and chair of the committee that conducted the review, said that a report by an IPCC working group "contains many statements that were assigned high confidence but for which there is little evidence."

Professor Shapiro said the IPCC's response to errors when they were subsequently revealed was "slow and inadequate."

Asked about the Himalayan glaciers error, Professor Shapiro said, "At least in our judgment, it came from just not paying close enough attention to what [peer] reviewers said about that example."

He added that there was concern about the U.N. climate panel's lack of a conflict of interest policy, as is standard in most Government departments and international bodies.

The report called for development of a "rigorous conflict of interest policy" and made detailed suggestions on what should be disclosed. Mr Pachauri has previously acted as an adviser to green energy companies.

“It's hard to see how the United Nations can both follow the advice of this committee and keep Rajendra Pachauri on board as head,” said Roger Pielke Jr., a professor at the University of Colorado.

In future, the IPCC should be overseen by a new executive committee which will include people from outside the organisation, the report recommended. The organisation’s head should also be limited to serving one six-year term.

Achim Steiner, the head of the U.N. Environmental Program, said that the review of the IPCC "re-affirms the integrity, the importance and validity of the IPCC's work while recognising areas for improvement in a rapidly evolving field."

Monday, August 30, 2010

An advocacy group working on behalf of Vietnam veterans has asked a federal judge in California to sanction the CIA, saying the spy agency has been blocking efforts to uncover its role in alleged experiments on US soldiers from the 1950s to 1970s.

The Vietnam Veterans of America filed a lawsuit on behalf of six Vietnam War veterans in January, 2009, claiming that the CIA had used an estimated 7,800 US service members as "guinea pigs" in experiments involving "at least 250, but as many as 400 chemical and biological agents," according to Courthouse News.

Among the chemicals the lawsuit alleges were used on the soldiers were LSD, sarin and phosgene nerve gases, cyanide, PCP and even THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.

The lawsuit described it as a "vast program of human experimentation" that was "shrouded in secrecy" and carried out without the informed consent of the experiment subjects.

"In 1970, [the CIA] provided Congress with an alphabetical list showing that they had tested 145 drugs during Projects Bluebird, Artichoke, MKULTRA and MKDELTA," the lawsuit stated, as quoted at Courthouse News.

As the defendant in the suit, the CIA is obliged, by judge's orders, to hand over data relevant to the lawsuit. But the VVA has asked a judge to sanction the CIA, saying the agency has ignored or blocked its requests for information, and has released only a small portion of the relevant documents.

The VVA's first attempts to obtain CIA data on the experiments "have been pending for over a year, during which time [the CIA] have attempted to sidestep their discovery obligations at every turn, withholding (or even refusing to search for) large volumes of relevant, responsive documents [and] refusing to provide ... witnesses to testify about their document searches and certain substantive topics," the motion (PDF), filed in a California federal court this week, states.

The VVA says the CIA had refused to use "a routine protective order" that would restrict any sensitive CIA data to within the courtroom, and instead blacked out large parts of relevant documents. The plaintiffs say the CIA refused to provide the names of the test subjects involved, allowing only the names of the six defendants who filed the lawsuit.

"Even more unbelievably, it appears that defendants have yet to search even the most obvious location for documents — Edgewood Arsenal itself," the motion states, referring to the location northeast of Baltimore where the experiments are said to have been carried out.

The motion states the CIA "served no responses or objections whatsoever" to the VVA's second and third requests for information.

The motion asks that the judge, in addition to sanctioning the CIA, also order the CIA to pay the VVA's costs associated with its attempts to obtain CIA information.

Judge James Larson of the US District Court in northern California will begin hearing arguments in the case on Sept. 29.

The VVA describes itself as "the only national Vietnam veterans organization congressionally chartered and exclusively dedicated to Vietnam-era veterans and their families."

A 2003 report (PDF) from the Department of Veterans Affairs states that "between 1950 and 1975, about 6,720 soldiers took part in experiments involving exposures to 254 different chemicals, conducted at US Army Laboratories at Edgewood Arsenal, MD. Congressional hearings into these experiments in 1974 and 1975 resulted in disclosures, notification of subjects as to the nature of their chemical exposures, and ultimately to compensation for a few families of subjects who had died during the experiments."

A singer who performed in front of a “mixed audience” of men and women was lashed 39 times to make him “repent,” after a ruling by a self-described rabbinic court on Wednesday.

Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak, founder of the Shofar organization aimed at bringing Jews “back to religion” (hazara betshuva), has made it his recent mission to fight against musical performances for both men and women.

His “judicial panel,” with Rabbi Ben Zion Mutsafi and another member, sentenced Erez Yechiel to 39 lashes in order to “rid him of his sins.”

In a video clip of the court posted on the Shofar Web site, Ben Zion said that those who make others sin (mahtiei rabim), such as artists who make men and women attend performances or dance together, have no place in the world to come.

He displayed a leather strip he said was made by his father from ass and bull skin, with which Yechiel was to have been whipped.

Yechiel, who said, “I accept upon myself the lashing for my sins,” was ordered to stand by a wooden poll with his head facing north (“from whence the evil inclination comes”), his hands tied with a azure-colored rope (“a symbol of mercy”), and served his “sentence.”

At least this is what many libertarians like Ron Paul believe when they see someone like Glenn Beck or Sarah Palin trying to lead the Tea Party at the “restoring honor” rally this weekend. In fact, Ron Paul believes, if you’re looking for real freedom, you should really go back to the core of the constitution and the bill of rights, which Beck and Palin do not fully endorse when you really look at their beliefs. Whether it be Palin’s support for starting more wars or Beck’s beliefs on paying the private Federal Reserve MORE interest on our money by means of a VAT tax.

Ron Paul believes in neither of the above.

Here was Ron Paul’s message to the Tea Party via The New York Times just the other day:

“As many frustrated Americans who have joined the Tea Party realize, we cannot stand against big government at home while supporting it abroad. We cannot talk about fiscal responsibility while spending trillions on occupying and bullying the rest of the world. We cannot talk about the budget deficit and spiraling domestic spending without looking at the costs of maintaining an American empire of more than 700 military bases in more than 120 foreign countries. We cannot pat ourselves on the back for cutting a few thousand dollars from a nature preserve or an inner-city swimming pool at home while turning a blind eye to a Pentagon budget that nearly equals those of the rest of the world combined.”

While the Tea Party will be out supporting Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin this weekend, you wonder how many of them will be in full support of more wars and paying more interest to a group of untouchable and unauditable private bankers otherwise known as the FED? This is precisely what Ron Paul is asking the American public to consider when looking at the Tea Party leaders and see if they really stand for what they believe in.

Ron Paul believes the Tea Party is not about “left” or “right” like a lot of political pundits make it out to be. It’s about the constitution, and limited government.

Lebanese army: Israel using espionage balloonsHot air balloons equipped with cameras, self-destruction mechanisms, being used by Israel to collect intelligence on Lebanon, army claims. Arab media report balloons seen over Baalbek, eastern mountain ridge, but military expert says firing back would reveal location of weapons
Roee Nahmias Published: 08.29.10, 09:41 / Israel News

The Lebanese army is claiming that Israel has begun using a new tool to collect intelligence above Lebanon's skies – hot air balloons equipped with cameras, transmission capabilities and self-destruction mechanisms. The charges follow an escalation between Israel and Lebanon's army, which reached a new low in the recent border skirmish.

According to reports in Arab media, "Bombardier" hot air balloons were spotted over Baalbek, the villages of Nahla and Younin and the east Lebanon mountain ridge. A military expert told London-based al-Sharq al-Awsat that firing at the balloons would be problematic, because it would reveal the location of weapons caches.

A statement released by the Lebanese army over the weekend said that on Thursday, at 7:40 pm, "espionage balloons" were seen over east Lebanon. "This is a new violation of Lebanese sovereignty," the statement said.

On Friday, Lebanese newspaper al-Liwa reported that Israel indirectly warned the Lebanese army that the IDF could annihilate it within four hours. According to the report, Frederick Hof, a senior advisor to US Mideast envoy East George Mitchell, told Lebanese army commander Jean Kahwajim that should his army initiate additional fire exchanges with Israel, the IDF would operate its contingency plan and respond harshly.

The report further quoted Mitchell's aide as telling the Lebanese commander that Israel had decided to carry out a plan "which would completely destroy the Lebanese army's bases, centers and offices within four hours."

Lieutenant-Colonel (res.) Dov Harari was killed in the border skirmish earlier this month and another officer was seriously injured. Firing began when IDF forces entered a border enclave in order to uproot a tree. Lebanon later blamed Israel for violating UN Resolution 1701, but a UNIFIL report later ruled that the tree was on the Israeli side of the border.

ANOTHER weekend, another grass-roots demonstration starring Real Americans who are mad as hell and want to take back their country from you-know-who. Last Sunday the site was Lower Manhattan, where they jeered the “ground zero mosque.” This weekend, the scene shifted to Washington, where the avatars of oppressed white Tea Party America, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin, were slated to “reclaim the civil rights movement” (Beck’s words) on the same spot where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. had his dream exactly 47 years earlier.

Vive la révolution!

There’s just one element missing from these snapshots of America’s ostensibly spontaneous and leaderless populist uprising: the sugar daddies who are bankrolling it, and have been doing so since well before the “death panel” warm-up acts of last summer. Three heavy hitters rule. You’ve heard of one of them, Rupert Murdoch. The other two, the brothers David and Charles Koch, are even richer, with a combined wealth exceeded only by that of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett among Americans. But even those carrying the Kochs’ banner may not know who these brothers are.

Their self-interested and at times radical agendas, like Murdoch’s, go well beyond, and sometimes counter to, the interests of those who serve as spear carriers in the political pageants hawked on Fox News. The country will be in for quite a ride should these potentates gain power, and given the recession-battered electorate’s unchecked anger and the Obama White House’s unfocused political strategy, they might.

All three tycoons are the latest incarnation of what the historian Kim Phillips-Fein labeled “Invisible Hands” in her prescient 2009 book of that title: those corporate players who have financed the far right ever since the du Pont brothers spawned the American Liberty League in 1934 to bring down F.D.R. You can draw a straight line from the Liberty League’s crusade against the New Deal “socialism” of Social Security, the Securities and Exchange Commission and child labor laws to the John Birch Society-Barry Goldwater assault on J.F.K. and Medicare to the Koch-Murdoch-backed juggernaut against our “socialist” president.

Only the fat cats change — not their methods and not their pet bugaboos (taxes, corporate regulation, organized labor, and government “handouts” to the poor, unemployed, ill and elderly). Even the sources of their fortunes remain fairly constant. Koch Industries began with oil in the 1930s and now also spews an array of industrial products, from Dixie cups to Lycra, not unlike DuPont’s portfolio of paint and plastics. Sometimes the biological DNA persists as well. The Koch brothers’ father, Fred, was among the select group chosen to serve on the Birch Society’s top governing body. In a recorded 1963 speech that survives in a University of Michigan archive, he can be heard warning of “a takeover” of America in which Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the president is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.” That rant could be delivered as is at any Tea Party rally today.

Last week the Kochs were shoved unwillingly into the spotlight by the most comprehensive journalistic portrait of them yet, written by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker. Her article caused a stir among those in Manhattan’s liberal elite who didn’t know that David Koch, widely celebrated for his cultural philanthropy, is not merely another rich conservative Republican but the founder of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation, which, as Mayer writes with some understatement, “has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception.” To New Yorkers who associate the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center with the New York City Ballet, it’s startling to learn that the Texas branch of that foundation’s political arm, known simply as Americans for Prosperity, gave its Blogger of the Year Award to an activist who had called President Obama “cokehead in chief.”

The other major sponsor of the Tea Party movement is Dick Armey’s FreedomWorks, which, like Americans for Prosperity, is promoting events in Washington this weekend. Under its original name, Citizens for a Sound Economy, FreedomWorks received $12 million of its own from Koch family foundations. Using tax records, Mayer found that Koch-controlled foundations gave out $196 million from 1998 to 2008, much of it to conservative causes and institutions. That figure doesn’t include $50 million in Koch Industries lobbying and $4.8 million in campaign contributions by its political action committee, putting it first among energy company peers like Exxon Mobil and Chevron. Since tax law permits anonymous personal donations to nonprofit political groups, these figures may understate the case. The Kochs surely match the in-kind donations the Tea Party receives in free promotion 24/7 from Murdoch’s Fox News, where both Beck and Palin are on the payroll.

The New Yorker article stirred up the right, too. Some of Mayer’s blogging detractors unwittingly upheld the premise of her article (titled “Covert Operations”) by conceding that they have been Koch grantees. None of them found any factual errors in her 10,000 words. Many of them tried to change the subject to George Soros, the billionaire backer of liberal causes. But Soros is a publicity hound who is transparent about where he shovels his money. And like many liberals — selflessly or foolishly, depending on your point of view — he supports causes that are unrelated to his business interests and that, if anything, raise his taxes.

This is hardly true of the Kochs. When David Koch ran to the right of Reagan as vice president on the 1980 Libertarian ticket (it polled 1 percent), his campaign called for the abolition not just of Social Security, federal regulatory agencies and welfare but also of the F.B.I., the C.I.A., and public schools — in other words, any government enterprise that would either inhibit his business profits or increase his taxes. He hasn’t changed. As Mayer details, Koch-supported lobbyists, foundations and political operatives are at the center of climate-science denial — a cause that forestalls threats to Koch Industries’ vast fossil fuel business. While Koch foundations donate to cancer hospitals like Memorial Sloan-Kettering in New York, Koch Industries has been lobbying to stop the Environmental Protection Agency from classifying another product important to its bottom line, formaldehyde, as a “known carcinogen” in humans (which it is).

Tea Partiers may share the Kochs’ detestation of taxes, big government and Obama. But there’s a difference between mainstream conservatism and a fringe agenda that tilts completely toward big business, whether on Wall Street or in the Gulf of Mexico, while dismantling fundamental government safety nets designed to protect the unemployed, public health, workplace safety and the subsistence of the elderly.

Yet inexorably the Koch agenda is morphing into the G.O.P. agenda, as articulated by current Republican members of Congress, including the putative next speaker of the House, John Boehner, and Tea Party Senate candidates like Rand Paul, Sharron Angle, and the new kid on the block, Alaska’s anti-Medicaid, anti-unemployment insurance Palin protégé, Joe Miller. Their program opposes a federal deficit, but has no objection to running up trillions in red ink in tax cuts to corporations and the superrich; apologizes to corporate malefactors like BP and derides money put in escrow for oil spill victims as a “slush fund”; opposes the extension of unemployment benefits; and calls for a freeze on federal regulations in an era when abuses in the oil, financial, mining, pharmaceutical and even egg industries (among others) have been outrageous.

The Koch brothers must be laughing all the way to the bank knowing that working Americans are aiding and abetting their selfish interests. And surely Murdoch is snickering at those protesting the “ground zero mosque.” Last week on “Fox and Friends,” the Bush administration flacks Dan Senor and Dana Perino attacked a supposedly terrorism-tainted Saudi prince whose foundation might contribute to the Islamic center. But as “The Daily Show” keeps pointing out, these Fox bloviators never acknowledge that the evil prince they’re bashing, Walid bin Talal, is not only the biggest non-Murdoch shareholder in Fox News’s parent company (he owns 7 percent of News Corporation) and the recipient of Murdoch mammoth investments in Saudi Arabia but also the subject of lionization elsewhere on Fox.

No less a Murdoch factotum than Neil Cavuto slobbered over bin Talal in a Fox Business Channel interview as recently as January, with nary a question about his supposed terrorist ties. Instead, bin Talal praised Obama’s stance on terrorism and even endorsed the Democrats’ goal of universal health insurance. Do any of the Fox-watching protestors at the “ground zero mosque” know that Fox’s profits are flowing to a Obama-sympathizing Saudi billionaire in bed with Murdoch? As Jon Stewart summed it up, the protestors who want “to cut off funding to the ‘terror mosque’ ” are aiding that funding by watching Fox and enhancing bin Talal’s News Corp. holdings.

When wolves of Murdoch’s ingenuity and the Kochs’ stealth have been at the door of our democracy in the past, Democrats have fought back fiercely. Franklin Roosevelt’s triumphant 1936 re-election campaign pummeled the Liberty League as a Republican ally eager to “squeeze the worker dry in his old age and cast him like an orange rind into the refuse pail.” When John Kennedy’s patriotism was assailed by Birchers calling for impeachment, he gave a major speech denouncing their “crusades of suspicion.”

Among the slogans of the Bush administration was that of ‘regime change’. Specifically, the term was intended for Iran and Syria, although the extremist neo-conservatives also wrote about regime change in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, and every other Arab country that opposes Israel’s hegemony.

Then came the terrorists along with the legitimate resistance, and broke the U.S occupation’s back in Iraq, with the result being that America lost the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and became like the losing gambler who says “I’ll win back my money then stop”.

And yet, the famous lie about the Iranian regime in 2006 is still being reiterated by the Israeli fascists and their supports in the United States.

The MEMRI translation group, which was started by Benjamin Netanyahu and run by former intelligence officers and Likudniks, had quoted Mahmoud Ahmadinejad allegedly saying that Israel must be “wiped off the map”. Today, I owe the Online Journal website and Wayne Madsen for reminding us all that what the Iranian President had actually said in Persian (quoting Ayatollah Khomeini) was: “the regime occupying Jerusalem must vanish from the page of time”. In other words, Ahmadinejad was speaking about changing the Israeli regime, and not ethnically cleaning Israelis. This is not to mention that the term [regime change] had become popular after George W. Bush made it an integral part of his policy in the Greater Middle East.

If Barack Obama had put the senior criminals on trial before looking forward and letting them destroy his work, we would not have gotten to where we are now.

Choosing from hundreds of names

Rep. Louie Gohmert, a Republican from Texas, circulated last month the draft resolution 1553, which was endorsed – along with himself – by 46 other Representatives from his party. It gives the Israel the right “to use all means necessary to confront and eliminate nuclear threats posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran”.

While it is not likely that the resolution will be introduced to the House of Representatives where there is a Democratic majority, there was someone who reminded us that Rep. Charles Rangel, a Democrat from New York, had introduced a week before Gohmert’s resolution another resolution on ‘National Service’ in the House. The law would require the conscription of citizens aged 18 to 42 in the event of war.

Any Israeli war with Iran will drag the United States to it, and a state of war is exactly what Rangel wants as a prelude for the “blank check” that Gohmert gave to Israel.

Perhaps I should add here that Gohmert and his wife regularly visit Israel and advocate for it, to the extent of endorsing Israel’s position with regards to its barbaric attack on the Freedom Flotilla.

The issue is always Israel, and the fact that American legislators place its interests above those of the United States itself. For instance, the Likudnik Senator Joe Lieberman attacks Iran as frequently as he breathes, and considers its rather theoretical nuclear program to be a threat to world peace, while he fails to mention Israel’s nuclear arsenal in any way. This is despite the fact that there is a fascist government in power in Israel that occupies, destroys and murders women and children, which is also what Sen. Lindsey Graham seems to have forgotten while inciting military action against Iran.

Along those same lines, Senator Chuck Schumer said at the annual meeting of AIPAC something that would almost be funny, had it not been for its implications. He said that Hashem (the Jewish Orthodox name for God) gave him his name Schumer, because his role in the United States Senate is to be the guardian of Israel (Shomer in Hebrew).

He is the guardian of Israel, but not of the United States. Like an overwhelming majority in both the Senate and the House, Schumer would most probably endorse any Israeli war against Iran, or even an American war on Iran on behalf of Israel, notwithstanding the description by the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen, that any such war will be calamitous.

The United States has lost more than 4000 troops in Iraq, while the number of U.S soldiers killed in Afghanistan exceeded two thousand recently. Why? There are many answers involving such explanations as the dream of an American empire that dominates the world, or oil. However, the most important factor behind the war has always been Israel. Hence, the threat also involves Lebanon where there is Hezbollah, the Palestinians everywhere, and any Arab country opposing a U.S policy that has been defeated, but whose supporters nevertheless continue to be active because Barack Obama decided to look forward, and forgot that those who do not learn from history, are doomed to repeat it.

GENEVA, Aug. 25, 2010 (Reuters) — A huge particle detector to be mounted on the International Space Station next year could find evidence for the anti-universe often evoked in science fiction, physicists said on Wednesday.

Speaking as the 8.5-tonne Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer (AMS) machine was being loaded into a huge U.S. Air Force cargo plane at Geneva airport, they said the 20-year research program would bring a huge step forward in understanding the cosmos.

"If there is an anti-universe, perhaps out there beyond the edge of our universe, our space-based detector may well be able to bring us signs of its existence," U.S. scientist and Nobel laureate Samuel Ting told a news conference.

"The cosmos is the ultimate laboratory."

Ting, a 73-year-old professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is principal investigator for the project, which involves some 500 scientists and technicians round the globe.

Cosmologists say matter and anti-matter -- which annihilate each other on contact, releasing energy -- must have been made in equal quantities by the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. But the universe that emerged is overwhelmingly made up of matter.

Scientists hope the AMS will find clues to what happened to anti-matter, and whether there are other places that are almost entirely anti-matter, existing on the edge of the known universe and a mirror image of it and everything in it, including life.

DARK MATTER

The primary purpose of the detector, which has a super-powered magnet at its core, is to hunt another quarry -- the mysterious "dark," or invisible, matter that alongside dark energy makes up nearly 95 per cent of the known universe.

Scientists also hope the AMS will provide detailed knowledge of energy-charged cosmic rays -- an unexplored realm of research that can only be carried out in space.

But it may also answer questions not yet asked.

"It could turn up many surprises," said Roberto Battiston, an Italian physicist on the team. "Never have we been so aware of our ignorance -- we know that we know nothing about what makes up all but 5 per cent of our universe."

John Ellis, a British theoretical physicist described by Ting as the intellectual godfather of the project, said his aim had always been "to think of things for the experimenters to look for and hope they find something else."

The U.S. Super Galaxy aircraft is transporting the AMS to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for further tests.

In February it will be loaded onto a space shuttle and delivered to the space station on a flight specially approved by the U.S. Congress after heavy lobbying by Ting and colleagues.

The AMS has been developed by an international team working at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research near Geneva, whose Large Hadron Collider (LHC) particle accelerator is also aiming to solve mysteries of the cosmos.

The AMS project's costs, currently estimated at around $2 billion, are being covered by 16 countries, mostly in Europe but also including the United States and China.

The Great Collapse of the Chicago Climate Exchange
By Patrick Henningsen
Editor
21st Century Wire

Plagued by a free fall in carbon emissions prices and the perennial failure of Washington to pass any binding Cap and Trade Bill, it seems that the Chicago Climate Exchange is on its last leg, announcing that it will be scaling back its operations.

Chicago Climate Exchange or CCX, is North America’s sole voluntary, legally binding greenhouse gas trading and carbon “offset” projects in North America and Brazil. Rueters reported on Aug 11th that Intercontinental Exchange Inc, the operating body who purchased the struggling CCX in May this year, will be scaling back major operations this month, a move that includes massive layoffs. This is likely due to the complete market free-fall of their only product… carbon emissions.

Anthony Watts from the climate watchdog website Watts Up With That posts a graph from the CCX which shows carbon prices dropping like a stone, bottoming out this week at the embarrassingly low figure of 10 cents per tonne. Compare this to trading prices during its brief hay day in May and June 2008 where market highs reached $5.85 and $7.40 respectively, and you can say that most investors will be evaluating carbon as one of today’s more worthless commodities.

What a difference a year makes. It’s been nine months since the world watched the bottom drop out of a much-hyped UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen back in Dec 2009, with its neo-colonial agenda exposed within the first days of the summit. One of the keystones of the Climate Change alarmist movement was its audacious attempt to create a functioning market by monetizing the atmospheric trace gas known as CO2. Since last year, a number of scandals like Climategate have penetrated mainstream conversation, putting a rather awkward limp in the once nimble Man-Made Global Warming movement. Hence, apocalyptic frenzies and fears have dissipated and carbon prices around the world have continued to be pummelled by the market.

A Financial ‘Boondoggle’

Unlike most real markets, the carbon market was created by banks and governments so that new investment opportunities could seamlessly dovetail with specific government policies. It’s a fantasy casino based on a doctrine of pure science fiction. Certainly, gaming the system has always been at the top on the agenda of the new green eco-trader. Most people, investors included, might innocently ask the fundamental question, “what’s the point of having a CO2 commodities market?” The answer to that question should be obvious by now, and you can certainly look to the initial stakeholders in the various international climate trading bodies for a ‘Who’s Who’ list of individuals that have actively been pushing the global warming concept from its inception.

As American’s own CCX nears total collapse, climate alarmists and their vested partners are pinning their hopes on Europe. With most European countries happily singing from the same EU song sheet, institutional investment in the carbon market has seen a slightly more sustained existence. Europe’s socialized historical habit of subsidizing anything and everything means that it has been a better safe haven for something as radical as a carbon market. Many financial analysts would say that carbon requires a relatively steady price of around €40 a tonne in order to spur industrial investment in cleaner technologies, but unfortunately, Copenhagen failed and the announcements of emissions cuts are not coming as expected. Perhaps the reality gap is beginning to set in between governments’ political capital in climate change and the peoples’ ability to believe in global warming. Either way, the market will not be able to deliver such lofty figures, which is why real investors are getting out of the carbon market in 2010.

The front end of this game of ‘supply and demand’ is heavily reliant on EU governments making lofty announcements about future emissions targets. The logic here is that cutting emissions increases demand for EU carbon allowances. In the absence of such a restriction of the market, it was expected that the price would fall, and naturally that’s exactly what happened. In 2008, it cost €31 to pump out a ton of CO2, but today it will set you back about half that at €15. You will be hard pressed to find any financial wizard/pundit giving a sermon on a bullish carbon market in the near future- it’s just not happening anymore.

On the back end of the game, things are a bit shadier to say the least- some might call it a recipe for corruption. The industrial monopoly power giants and other green businesses who are ‘well connected’ are of course, being allocated free EU Carbon Allowances until 2012, but from 2013 some sectors will have to pay for 20% of their allowances (those with weaker political influence in Brussels), rising each year to 60% in 2020. Many government/power company ‘green initiatives’ will automatically result in high energy price to consumers, which naturally means guaranteed profit increases for those same corporations (see Enron).

Off-set scam

Carbon trading is underpinned by an equally dodgy product called ‘carbon off-sets”, most of which are taken on face value by the buyer. Not based on an actual ton of carbon emitted, rather governing agencies are issuing certificates for a fictional commodity of emissions not emitted. A rather wild concept. Worse than this however, it is near impossible to verify which of these thousands of so-called off-set projects in the developing world are actually legitimate. In the coming years, we will no doubt see or read a number exposes detailing the depths of this fantastic green scam.

Get in early and then get out

The formula: create an investment vehicle, hype the new commodity, buy low, watch share prices rise, sell high. The result is money, lots of it. In some cases it’s been about driving up the share prices of companies Gore’s group has already invested in. The fact that the original shareholders of the CCX have already bailed out with their sale to Intercontinental Exchange Inc. for a modest $600 million earlier this year only reinforces the reality that its creators have already lost faith in their elaborate invention. Likewise, the self-styled leaders of the climate change crusade Maurice Strong and Al Gore have already cashed in carbon fortunes already, whilst other active politicians like US President Barrack Obama, and United Nations IPCC Chief Rajendra K. Pachauri are engaged in similar play with their own financial interests in the Carbon Markets.

Like all government rigged quasi-commercial schemes, the only real beneficiaries are the initial shareholders- a special inner circle who are naturally ahead of the curve knowing about legislation and policy before it comes into existence. They are sometimes called the great and the good, the in-crowd, or the smartest men in the room (again, see Enron). Of these, almost all have jumped ship out of the market while their preferred shares- or in the case of the larger energy and manufacturing monopolies, their gratis “carbon allowances” given to them free by their governments- are still worth something. If you’re on the inside, it’s simple: get in early, make money and then get out.

Climate change based on science fiction

Pointing out the obvious is always a painful thing in the world of human affairs. The real reason for the complete and total failure of the concept behind trading an atmospheric gas like CO2 is something few within the green block will dare to even mention now, and it’s the same reason why the whole movement will go down in history as one of the most flamboyant efforts in the history of economics. It’s not just hubris. The whole idea behind making CO2 a commodity was to make it expensive and thus reduce the amount produced, which would (they hoped) reduce the effect of anthropogenic(man-made) global warming, or ‘climate change’ as it’s now commonly referred to. There was only one massive problem with this equation- there has been no global warming since 1998. So despite the hundreds of millions, perhaps billions spent on research and computer models addressing this possibility, no scientist or body has been able to show that man’s CO2 contribution has had any effect on the global temperature. Another massive blind spot for climatists is their almost religious denial that the sun might have any effect on the earth’s climate (studies show that it does, of course)- a major sore spot in any debate on global warming.

The movement was a merger of radical Collectivist ideas and huge financial opportunities. Men like Maurice Strong looked for their moral positions to be anchored by a small group of hand-picked ‘scientific authorities’, a latter day technocracy if you will. On the opportunist side we also see those same scientists who have made their careers, many millions of dollars over the last decade alone, on grants to prove that global warming was somehow happening. Other financial opportunists will include Al Gore, scores of companies like Carbon Fund and a number of charities soliciting donations to save the planet, all of whom were hoping to cash in on this non-event until its financial opportunities eventually die out.

If you step back and marvel at the timing and combination of the climate change movement and carbon trading business it’s enough to make you dizzy. Never has the world seen a more stunning collusion between government and big business, a tango that makes fascist enterprises like Mussolini’s Italy or Franco’s Spain look like student internships.

Still hoping for some silver lining in this otherwise cloud of failure, most diehard green activists are laying the blame on governments for giving away too many free carbon coupons in recent years. Certainly there is a valid economic point there, but greens were all too eager to get into bed with Wall Street and the Fabian Socialists in order to realize their dream of a new utopia. The current color-blind global financial system based on derivatives, futures and sub-prime gambling products will eventually take down the carbon market altogether, as speculators prey on untapped markets, selling more worthless paper to an ever decreasing naive minority. In the wake of the dot com boom and the housing boom, Wall Street certainly tried to make environmentalism sexy and trendy for investors, but we can see now that the results speak for themselves- CO2, a penny stock for kids. “Roll up, roll up. Anyone want a tonne of CO2 for 10 cents?”

In the end it’s just another age-old tale of grovelling academics, big business, politics, power and money. So it doesn’t require an expert to tell you that the carbon market was doomed to fail from the beginning.

This was part of a song Me and Paradise the Arkitech had intended to do as coverage of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally, as well as Al Sharpton's "Reclaim the Dream" rally. The plan was to spit a rhyme from both perspectives then end with a verse from Dr. King himself. We eventually decided to scrap the idea and concentrate on our next video. However, a article by Legendary Hip-Hop Journalist Davey D inspired me to record my Dr. King verse to Kayne's Power and create a video around it.

Written from the perspective of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jasiri X responds to Glenn Beck's rally and the growing racial and economic divide in America. From the police's brutal beating of Jordan Miles in Pittsburgh and murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland, the increasing poverty and joblessness, to the ever expanding racial division lead by the rhetoric of those like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin...Dr. King's dream has turned into a nightmare.

LYRICS:
I can't believe 47 years after our march
Instead of more enlightened y'all going back to the dark
I thought this was the generation that would capture the spark
To see it even more divided is like a stab to the heart
So ashamed that they want to evoke my name
To try a stoke the flame and make folks deranged
Trying to find scape goats to blame
That lynch mob mentality was the reason from ropes we hanged
So why try to provoke the pain is ya hope and aim
To see the flag blood soaked and stained
These wicked special interests try to coach the game
Cause the wider the divide they have the most to gain
See my dream was far deeper than racial equality
Tried to rid America of the disgrace of poverty
And challenge the government to create the policies that would make equality not a fake democracy
That spend billions on war with such great hypocrisy
And that's the reason that I met fate on that balcony
That's the reason that I met my fate on the balcony
That's the real reason that I met my fate on that balcony
No fool like Beck should have all that power
Buying into all that fear makes you a coward
Whose gonna stand up for the poor in this hour

On the Vigilant Citizen, we have shown time and time again that mind control symbolism is found in pop music acts. This disturbing trend is not, however, only confined to American artists. Mind control-related themes and symbols can now be found in pop music all across the globe, as a result of the globalization of popular culture. We will look at the themes exploited by one of Russia’s most important groups, Vintage, and explain their hidden meaning.

As seen in previous articles on The Vigilant Citizen, mind control symbolism is often found in the videos of young sexy pop stars who are on the rise. In most cases, the stars take on the role of the mind control victim in the videos, making the symbolism relating to it seem cool, sexy and desirable, while the idea of mind control is unconsciously planted in the minds of young people. Many videos depict rather vividly the harsh reality of being “puppets of the industry”, to a point that it is all out in the open, but most viewers remain clueless because they can’t see past the thin veil of symbolism found in the videos. This phenomenon is not only found in America, but in all parts of the world: in this case, the Russian pop group Vintage (Винтаж).

The group—Anna Pletnev, singer and composer Aleksey Romanov and dancer Svetlana Ivanov—released a single titled Mikkie, containing all of the aspects of the Illuminati agenda. The themes of mind control, alter-personas, abuse, sexualization, and dehumanization can all be found in this video, as well as in some of their previous works. So, before we get to Mikkie, we will quickly look at two previous videos...

U.S. military involvement may worsen situation in Yemen
English.news.cn 2010-08-29 18:31:07

SANAA, Aug. 29 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. military's high-profile involvement in Sanaa's operations against al-Qaida in Yemen may further fuel anti-U.S. sentiment among local population and make things worse for the Yemeni authorities, analysts say.

The U.S. open involvement is also causing embarrassment for Yemeni authorities, who have insisted Yemeni military forces alone are responsible for anti-terror operations in the country and that the U.S. military's job is limited to intelligence and training.

U.S. officials have recently admitted that the U.S. has mounted raids on al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen and they have also indicated that the U.S. anti-terror focus is shifting to Yemen.

According to a New York Times report on Aug. 14, the U.S. launched an air raid on al-Qaida's branch in the northeastern province of Marib in May, in its fourth onslaught on al-Qaida bases in the country since last December.

Washington had been tight-lipped about its "secret bombing raids" against al-Qaida's affiliates.

And according to a Washington Post article on Aug. 25, for the first time since Sep. 11, 2001, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) called al-Qaida in Yemen the top terror threat to U.S. security, as al-Qaida has been decimated by predator strikes in Pakistan.

The Obama administration officials have called for an escalation of U.S. operations, worried that Yemen may become the next training center for al-Qaida. Drone strikes were suggested.

Asked to comment on these reports, a Yemeni Foreign Ministry spokesman told Xinhua by telephone that the reports about the U.S. military's involvement in anti-terror operations in Yemen have left the Yemeni government in an awkward dilemma, and the United States should be responsible for these reports.

During a visit to Sanaa earlier this year, Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said: "Iraq was yesterday's war. Afghanistan is today's war. If we don't act preemptively, Yemen will be tomorrow's war."

Yemen has long been a haven for Islamic jihadists, and such factors as tribal culture, poverty and corruption have helped create a fertile ground for extremism.

Yemen has been struggling with instability. Abductions of foreigners and bombings are common. And there have been reports of collusion between separatists in the south and al-Qaida.

Ayman al-Zawahiri, deputy operations chief of al-Qaida, said last month the U.S. military forces had already been involved in operations in Yemen and he urged religious leaders to mount a jihad, or holy war against the U.S.

He mentioned U.S. missile attacks in southern Yemen in the Gulf of Arden last December, in which 43 al-Qaida members and 42 civilians were killed.

In January, over 100 religious leaders gathered in Sanaa, declaring that they would start a jihad if there was a foreign military invasion.

On May 24, Yemeni tribes condemned the U.S. for its air raid on Marib, as well as bombings of oil pipelines between May 25 and June 12.

A former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden predicted on Friday that a war between the Yemeni government and al-Qaida troops may break out and the U.S. would intervene militarily when it is deemed necessary.

Al-Qaida's rise in the south of Yemen has aroused deep concerns in the U.S. However, Washington's high-profile military involvement would only backfire, as it is likely to have a negative impact on the political situation in the country and further stoke up anti-U.S. sentiment, with more extremists swarming to Yemen to join a jihad against the U.S., analysts say.

A California judge has ruled that the $75,000 in fees paid to Sarah Palin for her speech at a state university should not have been kept secret.

The ruling issued this week serves as a postscript to the flap over Palin's June visit to California State University Stanislaus, where university officials repeatedly refused to disclose how much they had paid to lure the A-list Republican celebrity-pol to serve as keynote speaker for a fundraising gala. Even after a state senator and an advocacy group filed formal requests for the Palin contract, top university officials stood their ground, saying they had signed a confidentiality agreement with Palin that was binding.

This week, the judge said otherwise.

"The University's failures to … produce records when and as requested, whether deliberate, negligent or inadvertent, constitute violations of its obligations under the California Public Records Act," wrote Stanislaus County Superior Court Judge Roger Beauchesne. "The reasonable inference from the evidence produced is that the University, in its official capacity, has 'used' the contract between the Washington Speaker's Bureau (with Ms. Palin and the CSU Foundation) in the conduct of the public's business; therefore, said contract is also a public record and should have been produced to Petitioner."

With the ruling, the full contract with Palin -- including its calls for first class or private Lear jet travel, luxury hotel accommodations, pre-screened questions, and "bendable" straws -- was formally made public. (A portion of the contract had already surfaced courtesy of some dumpster-diving students.)

"This is a great day for transparency and government accountability," state senator Leland Yee, a San Francisco Democrat, said of the court ruling. "However, it is also a sad day when a public institution so grossly violates state law and when their legal counsel is ignorant of the public records statute. It is even worse that university administrators attempted to blame students for their own negligence and misconduct."

RICHMOND, Calif.—California officials are outfitting preschoolers in Contra Costa County with tracking devices they say will save staff time and money.

The system was introduced Tuesday. When at the school, students will wear a jersey that has a small radio frequency tag. The tag will send signals to sensors that help track children's whereabouts, attendance and even whether they've eaten or not.

School officials say it will free up teachers and administrators who previously had to note on paper files when a child was absent or had eaten.

Sung Kim of the county's employment and human services department said the system could save thousands of hours of staff time and pay for itself within a year.

The CIA is making secret payments to multiple members of President Hamid Karzai's administration, in part to maintain sources of information in a government in which the Afghan leader is often seen as having a limited grasp of developments, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The payments are long-standing in many cases and designed to help the agency maintain a deep roster of allies within the presidential palace. Some aides function as CIA informants, but others collect stipends under more informal arrangements meant to ensure their accessibility, a U.S. official said.

The CIA has continued the payments despite concerns that it is backing corrupt officials and undermining efforts to wean Afghans' dependence on secret sources of income and graft.

The U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said a significant number of officials in Karzai's administration are on the payroll. Paul Gimigliano, a CIA spokesman, disputed that characterization, saying, "This anonymous source appears driven by ignorance, malice or both."

A former agency official said the payments were necessary because "the head of state is not going to tell you everything" and because Karzai often seems unaware of moves that members of his own government make.

The disclosure comes as a corruption investigation into one of Karzai's senior national security advisers - and an alleged agency informant - puts new strain on the already fraying relationship between Washington and Kabul.

Top American officials including Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.) have expressed concern about Karzai's efforts to rein in anti-corruption teams, as well as intervention in the case against the security adviser. The aide, Mohammad Zia Salehi, is accused of accepting a $10,000 car as a bribe in exchange for his assistance in quashing a wide-ranging corruption probe.

The issue carries enormous stakes for the Obama administration. Concerns that the Afghan government is hopelessly corrupt have prompted a congressional panel to withhold billions of dollars in aid, and threaten to erode American support for the war.

But Karzai supporters accuse their U.S. counterparts of exploiting the issue, and the Salehi arrest in particular, to humiliate the Afghan leader while ignoring more pressing priorities.

In the latest sign of his vexation, Karzai said Thursday that President Obama's timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops "has given courage to the enemies of Afghanistan," and complained that the United States wasn't doing enough to force Pakistan to stop supporting the Taliban.

"We haven't progressed in the war against terrorism," Karzai said in a statement.

The CIA has maintained relationships with Afghan government officials for years. But the disclosure that multiple members of Karzai's government are on the CIA's payroll underscores the complex nature of the American role in Afghanistan. Even as agency dollars flow in, U.S.-backed investigative units are targeting prominent Afghans in the government and trying to stem an exodus of more than $1 billion in cash annually from the country....

Further to our report last week Halliburton has confirmed that it has been awarded a letter of intent by Shell Iraq Petroleum Development B.V. for the development of the Majnoon field in Southern Iraq.

Dow Jones suggests the contract for the 15 wells could be worth $150m.

The giant Majnoon field is one of the world’s largest oilfields. The letter of intent provides that Halliburton will serve as project manager for the development work, in affiliation with Nabors Drilling and Iraq Drilling Company (IDC). The contract is still subject to final approval by the appropriate Iraqi authorities.

Shell is lead operator and holds a 45 percent share, partner Petroliam Nasional Berhad (Petronas) holds 30 percent and the Iraqi state holds 25 percent of the participating interests in all licenses. Shell has announced that the consortium intends to increase production from the current ~45,000 barrels of oil per day to a targeted production plateau of 1.8 million barrels of oil per day.

“Halliburton has made a sizeable investment in Iraq and we look forward to providing services to Shell and the consortium in order to increase production at this historic oil field,” said Dave Lesar, Halliburton’s Chairman, President and CEO. “We have in place the technology, equipment and personnel to ensure that we deliver the solutions that will help our customers in this region to meet their production goals.”

Halliburton has been active in the Middle East since 1946. Currently, Halliburton has more than 4,000 employees in the Middle East, and construction on phase I of Halliburton’s 400-man base in Burjisia, Iraq is complete.

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